Ford Foundation’s Build Initiative is Hitting Its Stride
In 2016, the Ford Foundation set out on an experiment—give $1 billion to social justice nonprofits, with all funds going to a combination of general operating support and organizational strengthening.
In short, it was going to use a chunk of money to give up to 300 nonprofits what the sector had been saying it needed for years. It was a big, if overdue, move for a lumbering giant of a foundation that had historically given mostly small, short-term, project-based grants.
Now two years in, Ford’s BUILD initiative is hitting its stride and starting to see results, including positive survey data from grantees, and emerging anecdotes from organizations that are planning for long-term change and working collaboratively in ways they never could in the past.
It’s an impressive start, but for BUILD Director Kathy Reich, even when the initial five-year experiment is over, the job won’t be done until similar grantmaking is the status quo, first for the entire foundation, and then maybe even in the rest of the philanthropic sector.
“Once we get Ford to act that way, I do have these grand plans to try to get other foundations to embrace this approach as well,” says Reich, who came to Ford from Packard, and a career in policy before that. “Organized philanthropy in the United States is investing tens of billions of dollars a year in the nonprofit sector, and we need to be investing it in the right ways that are going to get us the results we want.”
In fact, while Reich acknowledges there will always be a need for project grants, in her first week on the job she said that her goal was to change the default way Ford makes grants, and foundation president Darren Walker and executive vice president Hilary Pennington are supportive of that goal.